Brown by Kevin Young
James Brown. John Brown's raid. Brown v. the Topeka Board of Ed. The prizewinning author of Blue Laws meditates on all things "brown" in this powerful new collection."Vital and sophisticated ... sinks hooks into you that cannot be easily removed." -The New York Times
Divided into "Home Recordings" and "Field Recordings," Brown speaks to the way personal experience is shaped by culture, while culture is forever affected by the personal, recalling a black Kansas boyhood to comment on our times.
From "History"-a song of Kansas high-school fixture Mr. W., who gave his students "the Sixties / minus Malcolm X, or Watts, / barely a march on Washington"-to "Money Road," a sobering pilgrimage to the site of Emmett Till's lynching, the poems engage place and the past and their intertwined power.
These thirty-two taut poems and poetic sequences, including an oratorio based on Mississippi "barkeep, activist, waiter" Booker Wright that was performed at Carnegie Hall and the vibrant sonnet cycle "De La Soul Is Dead," about the days when hip-hop was growing up ("we were black then, not yet / African American"), remind us that blackness and brownness tell an ongoing story.
A testament to Young's own-and our collective-experience, Brown offers beautiful, sustained harmonies from a poet whose wisdom deepens with time.
Kevin Young's first book, Most Way Home, was chosen for the National Poetry Series and received the Ploughshares Zacharis First Book Award. His second collection of poems, To Repel Ghosts, a double album based on the late artist Jean-Michel Basquiat's work, was a finalist for the Academy of American Poets' James Laughlin Prize. Young's work has appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, and Callaloo. He is the editor of the anthologies Giant Steps: The Next Generation of African American Writers and Blues Poetry, both published by Everyman's Library Pocket Poet. Young is the Ruth Lilly Professor of Poetry at Indiana University and a former Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781524711146 |
| ISBN 10 | 1524711144 |
| Title | Brown |
| Author | Kevin Young |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Random House USA Inc |
| Year published | 2020-03-03 |
| Number of pages | 176 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |